Ok, this is a quick not complete guide on what where the steps I needed to follow in order to install XUbuntu 11.10 into my NV55S05u. Basically the problem is that the guys from Ubuntu decided not to include the readeon privative drivers into the build, and for some reason this board fails to start with the radeonhd driver.

First when you boot the cdrom or usb drive you need to enable nomodeset by pressing F6. It will boot into the command line, then you can either connect to the internet using Wifi (with no wpa stuff as it’s a pain to enable from command line if you are lazy as I am) or with the easy to use ethernet wire :D. Then run:sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fglrx
startx

Do the installation, reboot.

In grub press e to edit the initial settings and replace quite splash with nomodeset verbose. You will get into a login again, you run: